Tuesday, March 15, 2005

I haven't seen much debate in the blogosphere over the story in the New York Times on Sunday about the Bush administration's increasingly common and sophisticated use of prepackaged video segments, generally passed off as "regular" news stories, to get their message out to the public. Timothy Burke has a typically smart and unconventional take on it: whatever else is wrong with the practice, it is also clumsy, banal, classless, "tinpot"--making the U.S. that much more like every other place in the world which lacks a robust public sphere. And John Quiggin brought it up over at Crooked Timber, tying it into how the age-old collusion between advertisers and the media often crosses over into plain propaganda: "Of course, reprinting press releases with minimal editing has been a standby of lazy journalists for decades. But...[e]ven if the reader is led to imagine that the statement was actually made to an audience of reporters, there's no serious deception, though a well-designed press release can certainly ensure that the writer's key points get prominently reported in a way that makes them seem like fact rather than opinion. But the video news release goes way beyond this. The closest analog in the print world is those supplements, designed to look like news, with 'advertisement' in small print at the bottom of the page." I agree with John, though I think the problems inherent in this practice (which, to be sure, long predate the Bush administration) go way beyond the advertising mentality. In fact, I think the important issue is the need to distinguish between what government does and what advertisers do.

Advertising exists to sell things. In a very crude way, so does the government, at least in its executive function; it's the branch responsible for enacting policies and enforcing laws, and communication is a big part of that. Every department in the federal government--Agriculture, State, Defense, Education, etc.--has public relations people who are responsible for communicating with Congress and innumerable constituents, making a case for what they're doing and how they're doing it; if they fail to do that, then they aren't going to be able to do their job. That's a reality of public administration, and no one denies it. But advertising, in its selling, seeks to make a particular kind of case for its product, a case which involves a good deal of selectivity, misdirection, even deception in how it conveys its message. We don't want the government to make that kind of case for itself, however much it might increase its public effectiveness in the short or long term. Why? Because, to invoke Rousseau, we do not want the government--meaning specifically the executive branch--to exercise its own institutional or "corporate will" independently of what the people (ideally the legislative branch) desire. (As he put it (Social Contract, Bk. III, Sec. 2), the corporate will is "the common will of the magistrates, which is relative solely to the advantage of the prince"--or in other words, those actually holding executive power.) It is a precarious but necessary thing that certain specific persons and agencies be entrusted with the power to enact and enforce policy; a legitimate polity will be one which limits and watches the power of the executive to do so. To allow such limits to collapse is to allow the executive too much command over not just the establishment of policies, but also the determination of such. We're tolerant of advertisers exercising a significant degree over control over how their work is received by the public; after all, it is private goods they are selling (though we properly lay down certain standards, especially when it comes to goods that could potentially impact the health or safety of buyers and others--medicine, automobiles, etc.). But the government is selling public goods: our own business, in other words. And hence, we ought to be careful about letting the people in executive positions determine what or how much about that business is known.

In other words, we want an independent media. One needn't go deeply into political theory to make this case--the idea that press ought to form a "fourth estate" representing a defined body of interests in society, one set in opposition to those who are actually in government, is practically synonymous with the modern age. Still, I think the detour into theory is helpful, because it clarifies some important distinctions. Consider the obvious defense one might make to this article (a defense which, in fact, an old friend of mine, a former employee of the Department of Energy who regularly handled press releases and all manner of "strategic" communications): it's the journalists fault! The article makes it clear that financially strapped local affiliates and unprepared reporters can be counted on to desperately make use of any prefabricated story which falls into their laps; if they don't do the work to come up with "the other side of the story," or at least identify the source of the footage or words, it isn't the government's fault, right?

The reply to this response can take one of two forms. First, you could argue that the media is supposed to be "neutral," and that, by taking advantage of the decentralized structure of the American media today, the government's clever use of prepackaged news stories undermines the "objectivity" which news organizations are committed to. The news, in short, is supposed to be disinterested and trustworthy enough to give us the facts without interpretation, thereby enabling the people to decide things with an open mind. This ideal of journalism as a selfless, impartial labor on behalf of democracy is a great myth, and it makes for a strong argument against tolerating, at least not without strict limits, the ability of government agencies to use their PR resources to provide unnecessary crutches to media affiliates across the country. Unfortunately, I think this argument also has a serious flaw: as soon as anyone can plausibly make the case that reporters are not, in fact, neutral, objective, impartial and disinterested, then the door is kicked wide open for the party in government to step right in and claim that the "real story" hasn't been told, and justify using their position to spread as much partisan (that is, in service to their own party) information as possible. The fact that Fox News, which has never seriously pretended to be anything other that a voice for the Republican party, can insist that they're just playing the same objectivity game as everyone else ("we report, you decide"), I think shows just how weak this liberal ideal in practice actually is.

I don't particularly mind a partisan media, at least not in many things. Michael Kinsley made the argument years ago that, especially in regard to stories involving highly contested political, social, or economic facts and issues, he'd rather read the Wall Street Journal or some other similarly slanted paper, because someone not worried about hiding their opinions is more likely to dig into the real implications of the story than someone who feels constrained by an "on the one hand, on the other hand" ethic. I think his point is basically correct--the goal is to have a responsible media, and such responsibility isn't necessarily incompatible with a partisan one. The way to preserve that responsibility isn't primarily making certain that the media has no interests; rather, it is making certain that the media remains an interest entirely distinct from the institutional or corporate interest of those actually making and enforcing policy. That makes, I believe, for a much sharper and brighter line--no running of news stories which directly originate from the government without identifying them as such!--than the attempt to impose a nonpartisan perspective on the mainstream media itself.

Of course, the problem with partisanship is that partisans will form alliances, and from there you're only a step away from the government (or business, or liberal advocacy groups, or whomever) just writing the news themselves. Even the sharpest line will have some gray edges to be negotiated, and negotiated again. But to baldly accept the idea that the government has every much "right" to sell it's own version of the news to supposedly independent institutions is to blind oneself to the very real power imbalance here. It is one thing for a reporter to tell a story in such a way to make it easier for his or her preferred lawmakers to do what he or she hope they'll do; it's another thing for the lawmaker herself to tell a story to increase her own popular power. I see the real harm here not in the willingness of some news organizations to do some advertising, and let their sympathies show, but rather in the blinkered arrogance of a state or party that makes use of the needful and important tropes of journalism directly on its own behalf--and the fact that many journalists, too concerned about political goals or slashed budgets, are apparently happy to let them. To the extent that such is the reality of television journalism today, then the fact that video segments are flowing out of Washington D.C. without big red stamps on them, marking them "A Department of Agriculture Production," is a potentially a far greater threat to democracy than it may first appear.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."